Most actors I see in movies are really good. I realize that's because I do not watch most of the movies that are being made. Those that do get my attention tend to be big-budget high-end productions that got good reviews from viewers and critics I like. (I don't have much time for movies, so I like to play it safe.) We can have great actors for two reasons. One, it doesn't take very many of them. A few highly talented people -- not just actors, but also directors, camera people, etc. -- can entertain an audience of millions in the age of reproducible data. Two, everybody wants to be a superstar. Sure, there are plenty of excellent drama schools that turn talented people into even better professional actors. But you cannot just put anyone into a drama school, no matter how good it is, and expect them to turn out top-grade actors. The real bottleneck is the amount of talent; and acting probably gets more of this than any other field. There are not many slots for superstars. But the attraction -- and the payoff -- of being a superstar is so big that hordes of talented (and less talented) people are pushing into the field every year with fierce determination, trying to outcompete each other at every turn, and allowing producers to pick and choose from the best of the best. For many struggling actors, this is not a very good deal; for us as consumers, it certainly is. You might ask, at this point, whether the marginal value of slightly better movies is really great enough to justify all of this effort and expenditure. I'm not convinced it is, mostly because I do not really care that much about movies. But I do care a lot about education, and this is why I want the same thing for teachers. The problem with teachers is twofold. First, in most countries teaching does not tend to attract top talent. In some cases this is about prestige, in others about pay and the lack of career options, or a combination of all those. But it gets worse, because even if you are both talented and altruistic, reason suggests you should not go into teaching but apply your talents in another field where you could have a bigger impact. Because that right there is the second problem: In teaching as it is traditionally done, a teacher's talent stays inside the classroom. A great teacher might have a marginal impact on maybe 100-200 students a year, totalling a few thousand over the course of their career -- that's not completely terrible in terms of impact, but not all that impressive either. More importantly, their successes and insights usually do not influence other teachers. In most school systems, there are next to no mechanisms or incentives for teachers to learn from one another, for successful methods to spread and for colleagues to compare the effectiveness of different approaches. Every once in a while, a particularly innovative teacher might merit a portrait in a local newspaper or contribute to a new textbook; but that is about the extent of teacher stardom in most places. All of this is about to change. As the central role of teachers shifts from being a bearer of knowledge towards that of a coach and enabler, it makes more sense than ever to outsource the explaining and input part to outside experts. This opens up new avenues for talented teachers to become highly visible and scale their impact by creating video lectures, interactive online courses, and other teaching materials. At the moment, only a minority of teachers use these materials. But as soon as the early adopter stage gives way to widespread implementation of these teaching materials in schools, we can expect to see a race to the top, as producers and distributors rush to get a share of the market. Eventually, the most engaging and effective materials can be expected to reach an audience of millions, hopefully leading to the sort of professionalization and selection effects that currently give us supremely engaging movies and TV series. This is already happening, but we can help speed it along -- and in doing so, profit from it at the same time. As school administrators, we will want to attract top talent by making our school into a place that allows teachers to become superstars -- e.g. by allowing for and incentivizing the production and sharing of scalable teaching materials, and providing the infrastructure to publish and spread these materials in a way that profits both the teacher and the school. As teachers, we can seek out and use the best of the teaching materials that are currently out there and spread the word to increase their exposure. As technologists, we can help along the development of platforms that allows producers and distributers to profit from their work. And as everybody else, we can curate and use learning materials for our own purposes, because the time when learning started and ended in school is over. I'll end with a quote that looks even further into the future: "If a concerted effort were made, we could develop methods for transferring bodies of understanding — intellectual mastery — far more rapidly, cheaply, and efficiently than we do now. Universities still use medieval (!) techniques (lecturing) to noisily, haphazardly and partially transfer fragments of 21st century disciplines, taking many years and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per transfer per person. But what if people could spend four months with a specialized AI — something immersive, interactive, all-absorbing and video game-like, and emerge with a comprehensive understanding of physics, or materials science, or evolutionary psychology? To achieve this, technological, scientific, and entertainment innovations in several dozen areas would be integrated: Hollywood post-production techniques, the compulsively attention-capturing properties of emerging game design, nutritional cognitive enhancement, a growing map of our evolved programs (and their organs of understanding), an evolutionary psychological approach to entertainment, neuroscience-midwived brain-computer interfaces, rich virtual environments, and 3D imaging technologies. Eventually, conceptual education will become intense, compelling, searingly memorable, and ten times faster. A Gutenberg revolution in disseminating conceptual mastery would change everything, and — not least — would allow our species to achieve widespread scientific self-understanding. We could awaken from ancient nightmares." (John Tooby's answer to the 2009 Edge question, "What will change everything?")
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Our ambition is to create a robust blueprint for innovative micro-schools that is easy to adopt and adapt by others. The first incarnation of our school will serve as a testing ground and prototype, but we have been trying to design our concept for scalability from day one. This introduces a number of constraints and requirements. I. Ease of useOur presentation of the school concept needs to be clear and unambiguous, easy to understand without requiring a background in education science or the like, and attractive to as many stakeholders as possible (potential founders, teaching staff, parents, students, experts, members of the community, etc.). Ideally, we will want to present our blueprint in the form of a step-by-step guide (or, eventually, a conversational interface), with deeper layers of detailed (and localized) instructions as well as troubleshooting guides added over time. (As we become a network of schools, this could evolve into a comunally managed wiki or something along those lines.) II. AdaptabilityThe concept needs to be adaptable to different circumstances along multiple dimensions, including:
III. Quality assuranceIf our concept is easy to implement and works in a variety of contexts, that still does not mean the resulting schools will be any good. We need to make sure that the quality of the students' education does not depend on one particular team. This is the hardest part. Outside of licencing and supervision within our franchise model, I see three interlocking ways of raising the probability that schools built according to our concept will not degrade in quality: architecture, incentives/selection effects, and materials.
One key aspect of our school's architecture is the focus on collaboration with experts, businesses and institutions in the community. This means that much of the expertise comes from outside the school itself. While different school administrators might do better or worse at curating this influx of expertise, the number of different expert and community contacts required to fill a school year makes it very unlikely that students do not take anything useful away from it. (Contrast the practice in public schools, where students might well be stuck with a bad teacher -- or more -- for years on end.) Curating, organizing and implementing these collaborations calls for a team of highly flexible and creative individuals with a keen sense for the needs of both students and the community. While selection effects will probably apply, at least in the beginning, attracting people who share our ideals and feel up to the challenge, we will develop tentative guidelines for choosing new team members (e.g. based on this[link: 7 questions]) to be used by administrators. We also encourage creating incentives to reward innovation and professional development, from bonuses to different career options within the network. Finally, the simplest way of ensuring quality is providing well-vetted and easy-to-use teaching materials, from ready-made workshop and course plans to curated online courses, learning games, etc. Interlocking with the previous point, continually creating and improving these materials will not only be part of the job description of our coaches, but will also be rewarded (eventually based on their reception in the network) through a bonus system. Of course, all of this still needs to be war-gamed. What else can possibly go wrong? Where are we creating incentives that run counter to our purpose? ... |
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August 2017
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